Chapter 1
The big man with pale blond hair shivered.
“Are you sure it’s safe? That he won’t find out?” He whispered, running his tongue over his dry lips.
His companion gave him a look of scorn.
“Of course he won’t find out. He’ll be dead.”
“But what if he remembers ….”
“He will be mindless. Your puppet. You have the ritual materials?”
“Yes, Lord Clovis.”
“No names! Come then, we must blend his fingernail clippings with the bone of a relative and your blood as his master, along with my own ingredients, and place the two near-identical smooth stones in the potion. You have the river stones? One for his heart and one as a control?”
“Yes my lord.”
“Good. It would work better with his flesh and bone, but I recognise that this is difficult for an underling to obtain, so the bones of his ancestors from the churchyard will have to do.”
The blond looked shifty but nodded.
The cloaked Lord Clovis made a careful brewing, scorning to explain to his tool what he was doing. Finally he laid the two stones into the liquid and chanted. When he brought them out, they had a silvery sheen.
“And now to his chamber before he awakes, and a poniard in the heart,” he gloated, “And I will be able to see how well it works before I try it on that old fool Engilbert.”
The blond shivered. If anything went wrong, this was treason.
He hastened to the castellan’s chamber, his companion following.
Peter Haldane awoke in a hurry, confronted by his illegitimate son, the captain of his guard. Before he could register that he was betrayed, however, the slender poniard had slipped through his skin, between his ribs and into his heart. He died surprised.
“Good. Now open his chest and put in the replacement heart,” said Clovis.
This was something which was almost the undoing of Kort, Peter Haldane’s son. He was a brutal enough man normally, but this was his patron and father, even if he was surviving too long, and had failed to make a will in favour of a bastard son while he had a living, legitimate daughter. A daughter married to the warlord, Gyrfalon, who would not accept his wife’s inheritance being usurped. Better to keep the ailing Haldane in the semblance of life and enjoy the benefits of being castellan de facto. He gulped, and cut, and blenched at the blood.
“I’m wondering whether to cause death by exsanguination would be a better course of action,” murmured Clovis. “The blood might just putrify quicker if left in the body; a dry body might last longer before the smell is apparent.”
“Now you tell me,” said Kort, angrily.
“You knew this was an experiment when you agreed to take part in it,” said Clovis. “You can always have him will his lands to you now.”
“True,” said Kort. “If Gyrfalon will accept that.”
“Place it in the hands of the ecclesiastical court; that will hang it about for years,” shrugged Clovis.
“If Gyrfalon doesn’t decide to make sure it goes to my next of kin by gutting me,” said Kort.
“He has to catch you; and it’s a strong castle. I’ll leave you a scroll which you can use to raise all the dead in the churchyard if need be.”
“That would help. What do I do now?”
“You have put in the new heart and sewed up the hole. Rather badly, but never mind. Now put your hand on the other stone and command him to get up.”
Kort swallowed hard, trying to keep his stomach contents where they belonged. Dead men were supposed to stay dead. Everything in his being screamed at him that this was wrong, and that he should never have listened to the necromancer. Too late. One more swallow and he laid his hand on the stone and thought at the corpse to get up.
It got up.
“Tell him to open his eyes, moron,” said Clovis. Kort made a face and did so. It was horrible, seeing the staring, unseeing eyes of his former parent. He started to retch.
“Control yourself!” snapped the necromancer. Kort swallowed on the thin, bitter taste of vomit. “Now get him to speak.”
Kort thought of a trite phrase like ‘good morning.’
Peter Haldane’s corpse bleated, loudly.
The necromancer’s staff threw Kort to the other side of the room.
“What did you do, you incompetent?” screeched Clovis. “Did you fail to obtain bones from the churchyard and settled for those from the midden?”
“I … I was afraid of the dead,” Kort did vomit then, ashamed as he did of the sharp, acrid taste of his own fear, remembered and present.
“Afraid of the dead? You idiot, the dead cannot harm you. Not unless I’ve had anything to do with them,” sneered Clovis. “Well, you will have to make the best of it, and make sure you tell people some witch has cursed him. He can write notes. He can write?”
“He … yes, well enough,” said Kort. He got up from the crumpled position he had been thrown into. “But it worked.”
Clovis sighed.
“After a fashion,” he said. “I must be going before anyone gets up. Let me know how it progresses.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Kort, repressing the urge to cross himself. He had gone too far for that comfort now.
“Floris,” said Gyrfalon, “I was thinking that when winter starts setting in, it might not be a bad idea to visit your father’s court.”
“Won’t the barbarians attack in winter?” the young prince asked.
“No, they have enough trouble surviving. Much more snow where they come from than we have,” said Gyrfalon. “So as he is an old man, it would be prudent to go and see him while he is still alive. He will want to know what you have been doing, as my page, and he did express an interest, however badly couched, in meeting me, as well.” He smiled grimly, recalling the arrogantly-worded letter, written by a scribe, summoning him like a naughty boy to the capital. Cardinal Alessandro Cordo had sorted that out very quickly, but King Engilbert never knew how close he had come to having his summons answered by an invasion.
“Besides, with the signalling towers in place, and working properly now, there will be plenty of warning to withdraw all the village and their animals and food within the walls,” said Falk. “And I presume you did not mean to take all the church knights from their chapterhouse?”
“No, though I shall expect Sir Lyall to work with whomsoever I leave as castellan,” said Gyrfalon. “I should think that Foregrim will be happier to run the castle, even with attacks, than to make a ride at military pace?”
Foregrim shuddered.
“I grow too old for military pace, my lord,” he said. “I would rather face a barbarian horde.”
“Good; and young Lyall is in the habit of doing as you suggest anyway,” said Gyrfalon, sitting back in satisfaction.
“And what of your wife, my love?” asked Annis.
“Did you want to stay, then? No, I thought not,” as Annis shook her pale head.”And our adopted sister? Pauline? You are not due for some months. Will you come?”
“I will,” said Pauline. “I want gold wire to sew up the insides of our people when they are sore wounded, as it seems to work, especially as we have determined that what Annis does with her healing is magical, to enhance my skill. I can ride military pace; I never heard that being pregnant stopped Annis from doing so.”
“I wouldn’t dare ask her not too,” grinned Gyrfalon. “We are lucky to have you both as healers.”
“And lucky to have strong stomachs to put up with tales of healing over breakfast,” laughed Falk, grinning at his brother.
“Oh, the children soon stiffen our stomachs,” Annis smiled on Floris, Lukat, and Wilgarth, her husband’s pages, and on her half-sister Sylvia. Sylvia was more occupied with a mug of milk and a bowl of porridge than on the conversation.
“I am promoted from being one of the children?” Sylvia’s sister, Jehanne asked.
“You are well on the way to being a warrior,” said Annis, and Jehanne glowed with pleasure.
The elf who called himself Hrafyn was travelling on his own business. He had been to see his people, but as always the stay had been brief. Elves kept themselves to themselves these days, and private and standoffish as most humans would have considered Hrafyn, he found himself stifled with the same conversations, same music and same opinions, day in, day out. He had fallen in with a human companion once, and had found some humans to be stimulating. He preferred to watch them from a distance, as a child watches a disturbed ants’ nest, but watching them amused him.
He rarely gave much attention to the efforts of individuals, but this individual had caught Hrafyn’s attention.
The low, autumnal sun flickered golden speckles through the trees in a small clearing, and danced on the silver-gilt hair of a youth, slender as a wand, slender almost as an elf. She was using a longbow to fire at a target, and it was quite plain that she had never been taught properly.
It annoyed Hrafyn.
The bow and its art were his passion.
The girl gave a sigh of frustration.
“I am doing something wrong,” she said to herself. She was not expecting an answer when Hrafyn answered,
“Yes.”
His voice had her starting, and reaching for a dagger as she turned towards the voice. She relaxed slightly at the slender, leather-clad figure of the elf, hardly taller than herself. She noted the bow that he carried, and that he raised it with the casual grace of one so much an expert that he hardly had to think. Almost before she could realise it, let alone react, he had three arrows in the air. The first thing that she consciously noticed was three brief thuds, the sight of three arrows growing out of bullseye of the target, though he was further from it than she was.
“That’s how you do it,” said Hrafyn.
“Not much help to me when you are so good that you move faster than I can see, Master Archer,” said the girl. “Do you look for an apprentice? I’m not afraid of hard work.”
He regarded her.
“I do not generally work with others.” His voice was slow, every word weighed and considered. “But I will not leave a young girl helpless. I will start you on the path of learning.”
“Thank you,” she said. “My name is Idonea.”
“Hrafyn.”
“Thank you, Master Hrafyn.”
“Just Hrafyn.”
Hrafyn was an elf of few words; he took her bow, and placed it in her hand, showing her how to push the bow away from her when she had the arrow nocked. Once Idonea had been shown the proper technique, the improvement was dramatic.
“Why?” asked Hrafyn.
“Why do I want to learn? You might call my reasons whimsical.”
He shrugged; she might expand on that, or not, as she chose.
“It’s a complex story,” she said. “My mother was a maid to a great lady, Lady Emblem. Lady Emblem married, by arrangement of her parents, one Peter Haldane. It so happened that my mother, Edgyth, was also the half-sister to Lady Emblem, and when Lady Emblem was ill after her daughter was born, Haldane used my mother. He threw her out when she conceived me. The Lady Annis is about two years older than I am, and word is that she is married happily to a strong marcher lord. I thought to join her, but I will not be a maidservant. I hoped to bring useful skills as a warrior to a northern march castle.”
“I have heard the name of Lady Annis, daughter of Peter Haldane,” said Hrafyn. “Do you know the name of her husband?”
Idonea shrugged.
“Gyrfalon the Dark,” she said. “Some speak ill of him. But it is said by the peasants of Haldane’s demesne that Lady Annis is good and kind. She would scarce choose, as rumour says she chose, a man who does not use her well. Though by all accounts about My Lord Gyrfalon is that he has ever been less hated by his underlings than our shared father.”
“I … have stood against Gyrfalon,” said Hrafyn. “I, too, am following rumour. The rumour that a friend of mine, Gyrfalon’s brother, has reconciled with him. Our paths lie together.”
Idonea brightened.
“Will you have time to continue to teach me if we travel together? I will, in exchange, readily undertake all camp chores.”
“You have a good eye. It would be a shame not to teach you more. I do not need you to act as a servant. I camp with little fuss. You humans need so many things. I do not. I will teach you to camp like an elf. Have you eaten?”
“You are an elf? I … I saw the ears but did not like to ask. I thought all the elves were dead.”
“No. We … have ways of hiding at need. One day I do not doubt we will disappear, unless we learn to change. Change … is frightening. You have not answered me.”
“I … I think it would be a shame if you disappeared. No, I have not eaten. I have a bag of meal with me to thicken a stew, and can recognise some edible herbs and roots. I hoped to get good enough to hunt one day.”
“You may yet learn enough,” said Hrafyn. “Determination gets further than pure talent. You will have to learn the sword from Falk. It has never interested me as much.”
“Tell me about elves, please!” Idonea was eager.
Hrafyn hesitated, then shrugged.
“It does not matter; nobody will find an elf who does not want to be found,” he said. “Elves are some of the oldest beings. We had magic before anyone; and our magical skills are valued. We live in forests by preference. At need, we can merge with a tree. We build by making trees grow as we want them to, living architecture. We value learning and beauty, and music. There is learning and music and beauty in the firing of the bow. One must become the bow to be a true archer. There is no arrow, only the firing. Thus we approach those skills in which we excel. For me, there is no path through the woods, only the passing. For my brother Lwysgain, who is a bard, there is no harp, only the music flowing from his body.”
Idonea nodded.
“I think I understand,” she said. “I will find that helpful when learning.”
“Yes,” said Hrafyn.
